Call for Papers – Housing Studies Association Conference 2019

10 April 2019 - 12 April 2019

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Home Struggles: Politics, Marginality and Resistance in the Contest for Housing

Sheffield, UK

We are pleased to announce that we are now receiving abstract submissions for the 2019 HSA conference

Housing has always been a site of struggle, from the individual and household level to competing ideas over the direction of local, national and international policy. Yet the Global Financial Crisis of 2007/8 and continuing austerity have brought the struggle for home into even sharper relief, with negative outcomes accentuated by longer-term processes such as housing commodification and financialisation. Housing is centrally implicated in the ongoing retraction of welfare support – homelessness, eviction and displacement increasingly characterise the housing experiences of those at the margins, where migrant communities and young people are over-represented. This has given rise to new, and often innovative and collective, responses in the struggle for home, such as a rise in ‘housing informality’ (more readily associated with the ‘Global South’), as well as increases in squatting, housing co-operatives, eco-homes, pop-up housing and community land trusts, which are accompanied by a burgeoning housing activism and new solidarities. Yet, at the other end of the scale, there is a struggle over urban space, expressed through opposition to social housing renewal, gentrification and the privatisation of space through gated communities and secluded landscapes of privilege.

Between these two poles, many households face a range of dampened aspirations, longer stays in the parental home, insecurity in the private rented sector, and increasing anxiety over finding and maintaining a place to call home. Uncertainty over looming Brexit adds to this insecurity and reshapes the very meaning of the struggle for home to questions of citizenship and national belonging. The struggle for home is also expressed through competing national policy discourses on: the role of the planning system and affordable housing delivery; ideological battles over housing as a tool of welfare ‘reform’ or social assistance; asset-based welfare; and wider international struggles over housing as home versus housing as real estate. The outcomes of these struggles all impinge on policy and upon households, housing associations, developers, charities, private landlords and housing practitioners.

This conference seeks to reappraise the struggle for home in the contemporary period in capturing the shifting dynamics of the housing system, changing policy logics, the implications for specific groups and households, and the new and varied responses to these challenges. We welcome empirical, theoretical, policy, practice and activist contributions, be they historical or contemporary in focus, which speak to the notion of housing struggles and the battle for home at a range of scales. From the individual and household level through to neighbourhood, regional, national and international contestations.

This year we will once again be running a workshop event for Early-Career Researchers in partnership with the UK Collaborative Centre for Housing Evidence (CaCHE). We’re also working with South Yorkshire Housing Association (SYHA) to bring delegates a dedicated workshop session on housing and homelessness practice in and around Sheffield.

We welcome abstracts on any aspects of housing studies, and we are particularly keen to receive submissions from early-career researchers and those working in housing practice.

Please submit your abstract (200-250 words) by clicking on the link below and completing the form.

If you would like to apply for a bursary to help in meeting the costs of this event, please click here for further information.

If you would prefer to submit your abstract by email then please contact the conference organisers (details below). Please note that if you are submitting your abstract by email, you need to include the following information: full name; institution/organisation name; email address; telephone number; names of co-authors; the name of the person(s) presenting the paper; and whether or not you are an early-career researcher (Masters students, Doctoral students, Postdoctoral students (within 4 years of completion) or junior researchers working outside of academia).